Optical Engineering
• Open Access

A simple and effective method is presented for fast decoding of H.264 scalable video coding (SVC). The up-sampling operation in H.264 SVC makes the decoder very complex, because convolution and complex memory transactions are inevitable. The proposed method exploits coded modes of neighboring macroblocks (MBs) for determining up-sampling operation on MB by MB. The experimental validation shows considerable improvement in decoding time, and the proposed method reduces the complexity by about 25% on average.